Women

A couple of weeks ago, Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology issued its proposed amendments to the Protection of Women Against Violence Bill of 2015. They recommend husbands to “lightly beat” their wives in certain circumstances.

In around 350 days’ time, the year 2015 will begin. But, erm, shouldn’t we rather still be remarking that we’ve just celebrated the start of 2014? The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have a target achievement date of 2015. Which is next year. Once you consider it’s been …

Should those (mostly women) who do not participate in the labor market, instead remaining at home to look after the house and raise children, receive compensation for their work? It’s a thorny issue which is as divisive as it is complex.
In the final referendum of 2013, Swiss voters were …

Aid, donations and relief supplies are making their way to the parts of the Philippines most affected by the recent disaster. A conference held earlier this week in London and attended by high-level representatives of governments, U.N. agencies and NGOs, wasn’t directly focused on responding to the “

You may have heard of the U.N., but have you ever heard of UNRISD? Perhaps not – as a research institute they aren’t going to grab as many headlines as the WHO, UNESCO or the Security Council. Yet the work they do is just as valuable, the …

Crystal balls, horse-drawn carts, headscarves and tarot cards. If we were playing a word-association game, what group of people would spring to mind? If your brain is leaning toward ‘gypsy’ then you get a point. In Europe, gypsy is a common way of describing Roma and travellers; however, this …

Depending on how you are dressed, you can signal your status, identity, job and a myriad other markers which help locate you in a sociopolitical context.
They can show your distinctiveness, or membership within a group. Many jobs require a uniform, from the armed forces to hospitals to customer services, …

Sex trafficking.
It happens all over the world but is largely invisible to most.
What The Whistleblower (a drama, not a documentary) does is expose it as it occurred in Bosnia in 1999, four years after the Dayton Accord was reached.
Rachel Weisz plays Kathryn Bolkovac, a police officer from Nebraska who …

When the moon hits your eye like’a big pizza pie…that’s amore. Substitute “moon” for “man” and “that’s amore” for a significant proportion of Italian women. Exact figures on domestic violence are unknown for obvious reasons, but the more troubling occurrence of women being murdered is also not …

Back in May I wrote about the derisively named “storm in a teacup” over the decision of the Bank of England to remove reformer Elizabeth Fry from the £5 note. Why this was controversial to some was that it meant that no women, apart from the monarch, …

In which sector of the economy are women disproportionately (over)represented? And even though they are in the majority, still get paid less than their male counterparts? There may of course be more than one answer to these questions, however for the purposes of this blog post, the one I’m …

When you’re married to someone you (hopefully) love, they become the center of your universe. But what happens when they die? For many women the world over, becoming a widow means becoming a burden – and being tainted by stigma.
In 2011, the U.N. designated June 23 as International Widows’ …

The South Pacific: a region of inviting sandy beaches, turquoise waters – and unacceptable levels of violence against women. Life is especially difficult in Papua New Guinea, where an estimated 70% of women will be raped or physically assaulted in their lifetime. If this isn’t shocking enough, …

How often have you opened your wallet or purse, taken out any banknotes and then instead of spending them or paying them into your account, actually studied them? I too have not spent hours of my day examining the pieces of paper/cotton/melting polymer which allow me to …

When asked what items they never leave the house without, many people (in the West at least) would likely answer, “my mobile (cell) phone.” It would be pretty difficult for people in the U.K., for example, to adjust to a world where their handset didn’t accompany them everywhere; where …